Google Maps Street View has added Raleigh to the elite list of cities you can see from an eyeline perspective instead of the rooftop satellite view. Our entire office came to a grinding halt in productivity yesterday when we realized we could navigate the streets without getting out of our chairs. “Hey, go to my house!” Hey, my neighbors dogs are outside!” “Is Designbox on there?” It’s as if we were seeing our home town for the first time…and, although we were fascinated, we were also collectively creeped out. At least we didn’t see ourselves or anyone we know doing something embarrassing in the street… Anyway, it didn’t take long for our self-obsession to get old, so we virtually left Raleigh and started touring other lucky cities. I went to Manhattan to look for where my brother works, then to Brooklyn to check out where he lives. Then I went to Phoenix to see if I could see any adobe houses, and then to Salt Lake City to see the mountains

T Magazine, aka New York Times Style Magazine, finally has a look that matches its content: fashion and style. It’s full of juicy images against a stark white backdrop. It’s a pretty flashy (no pun intended) site, with left to right navigation as opposed to top to bottom. My eyes start to cross a little bit with the motion though, especially the never ending ticker tape of their new blog “the moment” at the bottom of the page. I end up closing my page down to a small size just to get rid of that.

Check out the site. What do you think? T Magazine
And here’s their new blog: the moment

Search 1, Google.
“blog success”
results: included a disconcerting yet fascinating series of phrases like “monitize” and “optimize” and “leverage the power of the internet.”

Search 2, Google.
“writing a business plan?”
It was at this point that my friend and I started twitching with discomfort…are we really researching “business plans?”

Fortunately for us, another friend briefly visited. She whisked in and immediately dropped a philosophical bomb on us: “Isn’t it crazy how time flies and how it’s so hard to do the things we used to do, like work a full day, go out for dinner and drinks, go see a band, and still make it to work on time the next day?” She then abruptly left saying “I gotta go! I’ve got something in the oven…not in my oven…. ha ha ha!”

That quick conversation, encompassing the passage of time, youthful energy (or lack thereof) and the very idea of parenting made us wonder…Didn’t people 20 years ago look older at our current age than we do? We’re aging better now than they did 20 years ago, right?

Search 3, Google.
“xx year old woman in 1987″
“xx high school reunion of the class of 19xx”

results: not helpful. Hmmm, well, people are having children at older ages than they used to, soparents have to have more energy, and thus stay younger looking, right?

Search 4, Google.
“Having children later in life”
“Older Mothers”

results: Mommy-Come-Lately, a site with lots of pics of happy families where the parents are older. They all look great, which does kind of prove our point that people look great today, but it still didn’t help us with what the same ages of people looked 20 years ago.

While we were perusing this site, we were, of course, singing “Johnny-come lately…the new kid in town…” Who was that by anyway? Oh yeah, wasn’t it the Eagles? Yes. When was that song?

Search 5, Google
“New Kid in Town, Eagles”
results: Wikipedia. New Kid In Town was on the Hotel California album and hit #1 on Billboard charts in February of 1977. And did you know that the Eagles got together in 1971 as a group to back Linda Ronstadt? When they later created their own band, the name, The Eagles, came as a nod to The Byrds. All of the Wikipedia infoand history of the Eagles is quite interesting. We probably could have spent the rest of the night doing VHI-ish “Behind the Music” Googling, but in this one instance, we decided to consciously come back to our original distraction on the exploration of aging.

We decided TV history might have some answers (it always does).
Search 6, Google
“TV women over xx in the 1980’s”
results: “Between Friends,” a 1983 HBO flick starring Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor as middle-aged divorcee friends. I have to admit, I found it a bit unnerving that these two actresses even knew each other, let alone liked each other and starred in a movie together. We couldn’t find any really good pictures from this movie, but we did find a LIFE magazine cover “Liz Taylor is 40!” from 1972. She looks good, but 40-year-olds today look younger than that, I’m sure of it.

What about the TV show, “Roseanne?”
Search 7, Google
“Roseanne, TV show”
results:There’s a a great pic of the cast on the Oxygen website here. Check out Roseanne – she looks pretty darn good, and she doesn’t really look very old either.

How old do you think she’s supposed to be in this part of the series anyway?
Search 8, Google.
“how old was Roseanne in the TV series?”
results: Wikipedia. The character was born in 1952. Becky, the oldest kid, was born in 1975, and she looks to be about 18, so that means the character Roseanne is about 41 here.

Becky looks way different than I remember her…like completely different. Yeah, do you remember there were 2 Becky’s, but they never actually said anything about the fact that the actresses changed? Oh yeah!

Hmmm, She looks familiar for some reason.
Hey, isn’t that the chick on Scrubs?

Search 9, IMDB
“Scrubs.”
IMDB click: Sarah Chalke
Sure enough, it’s her! She apparently got the part when the other Becky, Alicia Garanson, left to go to college.

Anyway, her face looked different the last time I saw Scrubs. Like her lips looked different. Did you notice that? Yeah. Search 10, Google:
“has Sarah Chalke had lip implants?”

Another diverging Google search result immediately caught our attention:
“Tara Reid opens up about botched plastic surgery.”

You’ll have to search that one yourself, because it was at this point that my friend and I realized just how far we had strayed from our quest of learning more about blogging. And we didn’t really learn anything that interesting, except that content really does affect ads – look at all those plastic surgery ads to the right! (And the trivia that the second Becky is the chick from Scrubs is bound to be useful somehow)… sometimes it’s the ride rather than the destination that makes the internet fun.

Fellow Designbox member and Onionhead Monster creator, Paul Friedrich, along with Bojangle’s expert, Bryan Pack, are currently attempting one entire day at Bojangles – from the moment Bojangles opens (5:30am) until it closes (10pm) or they are asked to leave. They decided on the Western Blvd Bojangles (Raleigh) because of the awesome wireless reception. Check out the live blog here.

When asked why they are doing this, Paul mentioned that they often meet at Bojangles and the time just flies by. “I bet you could spend a whole day here,” Paul said they said. “Well, hey, let’s do it,” was the next thing that was said. And thus, it happened.

It’s 2pm now, and so far, Paul says about 40 people have come to visit them. He has watched the changing of the customer-guard as it were. He says that opening time til around 7am, the white-haired gentleman come in, all sitting at separate tables but still talking to each other or reading the paper. Round 7ish, the painting and landscaping crews come in. Bojangles is also getting a big crew from the workers of NC State Fair, which is in town this week (more on that later WOOHOO). About 10ish-am, the clientele changes to college students in between classes. Then comes the lunch crew. We’re now in the late lunch crew. We are here for the worker shift change…seems to be happening.

We’re thinkin you could also tell the audience change by the shoes people are wearing. Right now, we have an abnormally high ratio of clogs represented. Earlier, there were a lot of cowboy boots…

And just so you get a feel for the flavor, the song on the radio right now is “Never Be the Same,” by Christopher Cross. Yeah.